Dear friends,

I have often wondered about Maria (Mary), the mother of Jesus: to become pregnant as young as she most likely was, for the first time and outside a recognised relationship, knowing everyone would think the worst of her, rejecting her, possibly throwing her out of her home...

We have just been dealing with such a girl. Let’s call her “Anna”. She is only 12 years old, but the drama of her life history is enough for even a 90-year old. She is an orphan and was an unwanted pregnancy from the beginning. The mother was unsteady to say the least and Anna was moved around different relatives on the father’s side. She showed disruptive behaviour from an early age, which confirmed to everyone that she was her “mother’s daughter”. Her mother then died and the girl remained with the only uncle who ever was committed to her upbringing – a younger stepbrother of the father. He finally

managed to get her to school and even taught her how to read and write (in her fourth grade) and she managed to catch up.

Her father then decided that she should live with him but unfortunately he died from HIV-related diseases after a short time, when she was just 10. The maternal grandfather insisted that he could cope with her and did not allow her to return to her step-uncle. In the next two years she moved multiple time between the maternal uncles, causing a stir one way or the other wherever she went. This included stopping school and living – at the age of 11 – with two different men (she is physically very developed) until the grandfather finally shipped her back to Tabora. However, there was no one left in that family who wanted anything to do with Anna and so she found

RUTH HULSER LINK LETTER NO.41 | DECEMBER 2016

Hello from Tanzania!

CHURCHMISSIONSOCIETY.ORG/HULSER

Name: Ruth Hulser

Location: Tabora, Tanzania

My role: As a doctor at St Philip’s health centre, I help run it and organise outreach clinics as well as a holistic community project, reaching out to people with specific needs

My call: To come alongside and walk with people not usually seen by all but who are seen by God, showing them that he cares

Anna’s grandmother on the farm

CHURCHMISSIONSOCIETY.ORG/HULSER

herself living again with her step- uncle, aged 12. After only a month there, she ran away overnight – who knows where, why? She came to our clinic two days later to look for her grandmother who lives on the farm. The grandmother is quite unwell and so asked us to find her step- uncle for us.

The girl then made a lot of allegations about her step-aunt and it took two weeks and a few meetings to work out what had really happened to her. In a multidisciplinary meeting, including the step-uncle and Anna, we were finally able to design a plan on how to draw her back into a lifestyle appropriate to her age group and to reintegrate her back into school. It heavily involved a team working closely with her, consisting of Verena, our German child psychologist volunteer, Samweli Maduma, our Familia Moja social worker, Samweli, our living group carer (for Swaibu) and the uncle and his family.

The uncle was very keen to give Anna the best possible chance in life and so were we when we realised that Anna was only 12 years old and saw how unhappy and desperate she was, hoping to find a

safe place where she was accepted and loved.

Maria (or Mary) was “lucky” from a worldly point of view; Joseph

accepted her anyway and she was not thrown into the world without protection or any resources as she was far too young and very vulnerable. Anna has been thrown a lifeline, but will she be able to grab it? Only time will tell. I have seen many girls like Anna, although usually a little older, with a history of broken homes, shifting carers, near to no parenting or protection, throwing themselves into relationships and early

pregnancies, renewing the circle of broken trust and broken lives.

Christmas is the birth of hope to a broken world – an illegitimate child has become our saviour, reconciling the brokenness that reigns in our lives and our world with the Father who reaches out in love to the lost, the broken and the empty parts/people of his creation. Praise be to Jesus Christ then, our hope and saviour, and to the Father for reaching out in love to bring a light to his nations.

Other news…

With the farm, we are building a new donkey house (we have now got three donkeys after our first foal was born). We preparing to start rearing some pigs so we can sell pork and at the same time produce more compost. We have also entered a new phase of fish farming as well and after an extremely muddy time in the farm pond, we managed to get 19 “starter fish” whose dirty water will fertilise our plants. We are experimenting with different methods of growing plants, trying sand and stones etc., as growth media. We have also built our second fly house, where we will breed larvae (grubs are a good low cost food for chicken and pigs as well as for fish). So you can see that slowly we are becoming more complete.

“Christmas is the birth of hope to a broken world – an illegitimate child has become our saviour, reconciling the brokenness that reigns in our lives and our world with the Father who reaches out in love to the lost, the broken and the empty parts/people of his creation.”

Above left: Waist deep in the mud, fishing!

Above right: Some of the fish we caught in a river basin

RUTH HULSER LINK LETTER NO.41 | DECEMBER 2016

Swaibu is settling in with his live-in carer quite well and is joined every afternoon by two other children in need. The clinic is faced with many administrative challenges as well as medical ones. Praise God then for a very capable multi-talented doctor who worked for us before. He has re-joined us for a period and is helping me and the new matron, Christina Mayega, get through an unbelievable amount of admin – creating new guidelines and tools to assess all staff etc. His name is Dr Advent!

On the technological front, we are grateful to say that we are very close to buying a new lab machine, which would make it possible for even small facilities like ours to do lifesaving, more advanced blood tests, tests such as cardiac troponin so that a heart attack can be confirmed early enough to try and dissolve the clot (a technology that no one has within the whole area). We can also carry out tests like PSA to diagnose prostate carcinomas early (no-one else within 500km can do these tests) and to check on levels of control of diabetes and thyroid function.

Just imagine simple tests such as these not being available until one makes a journey of at least 500 km, a journey that most people simply cannot afford. We will be only the eighth facility in the country to have such a machine.

Village life…

Our journeys to the villages continue, but I have to say that they are harder now (or are we just getting older?). The good news is that the government is committed to running a small health station in all the bigger village centres and in fact have already built many. All that is needed now is staff and some vaccine fridges. Time again will tell when we can reduce the trips.

We greet you all this precious Christmas time; may God richly bless you all with his presence. We also wish you all a wonderfully happy and healthy New Year.

Ruth, Juma and Geni as well as the clinic and Familia Moja team!

You can give online to Ruth at: churchmissionsociety.org/hulser

Contact details: ruthhulser@yahoo.com

PLEASE PRAY...

Pray for Anna and the many children like her. In a country where the concept of child protection is virtually unknown, and many families are broken, a child’s welfare and right for protection are late on the agenda in this country.

Pray for rain, please! We have not had proper rain yet and the forecasts for this year are very poor. Tabora has already been officially declared as a town that is short of food but we believe it’s much worse than reported.

Please pray for the work of Familia Moja, our children and adults as well as the farm projects. We are hoping to find sustainable income-generating activities which can be copied by both local communities and churches.

Please also pray for the new work in the clinic so that we can continue to develop the best ways of delivering a good quality service as cheaply as possible.

Above: A miracle machine which makes early diagnosis of cancer, diabetes and heart attacks both possible and affordable